Professor Erin Delaney

Bio:

Erin F. Delaney is the Inaugural Director of the GCDC and the Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law.  Her scholarship explores constitutionalism in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on judicial legitimacy.  Her work on judicial power and judicial design addresses both the “countermajoritarian difficulty” of an unelected judiciary and the constitutional aspiration of limitations on majoritarian democracy.  For her article, The Federal Case for Judicial Review, about courts in federal systems, she was named the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence at the Institution for Comparative Federalism (EURAC Research) in Italy, and she has held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University. Other areas of interest include the influence of Empire on the development and maintenance of democratic constitutionalism, as well as colonial and post-colonial constitutionalism more broadly.

Representative publications: 

Symposium: Chief Justices and Democratic Resilience: Judicial Leadership in Times of Constitutional Crisis, with Rosalind Dixon and David Kosar (eds.), Int’l J. Const. L. (forthcoming)

Mapping Power: Constitutionalism and its Colonial Legacy, in Redefining Comparative Constitutional Law: Essays in Honor of Mark Tushnet (Vicki Jackson & Madhav Khosla, eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Judicial Legitimacy and Federal Judicial Design: Managing Integrity and Autochthony, with Gabrielle Appleby, 132 Yale L. J. 2419 (2023)

The Federal Case for Judicial Review, 42 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 733 (2022)